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Cooking and Culinary Schools

The Puzzle of an Impossible Dinner

Published May 2009

Did you catch the recent episode of Dinner: Impossible with brawny Robert Irvine? In it, he was challenged by New York Times puzzle creator Will Schortz to cook lunch for roughly 500 (!) crossword puzzle experts attending the American Crossword Puzzle Championships. The real puzzle? To make each dish a clever and subtle clue to an actual phrase involving food. Think "peaches and cream" or "stick to your ribs". Crossword puzzle contestants would then have a chance to win fame and fortune (or maybe just a free lunch) by figuring out the phrase each dish referenced.

And, to make it really impossible, Irvine and his team were told to do it all -- come up with the phrases, construct the menu, do the shopping, cook the food for hundreds, and (most importantly for this episode) plate it cleverly -- in six hours. Six. Sounds like a good challenge for culinary students.

We saw the show, and were impressed that the small team of sous chefs and cooks (with the "help" of even a couple puzzle experts) were able to pull it off. The only thing that seemed wrong was that the descriptions of food were read to the contestants. After all the careful menu planning and plating, shouldn't a look at the food have been the best clue?

But perhaps Irvine was satisfied with completing the challenge well enough that contestants were able to pick up on the 'proof in the pudding' with verbal rather than visual clues. After all, he has successfully wowed everyone from the British Royal Family on the yacht Britannia to master instructors at the Culinary Insitute of America.

The idiom we're looking for might be soup to nuts, but we aren't sure.